Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpxETG4PlK4

INTRODUCTION: THE BOOGEYMAN

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! My name is Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is The Monsters of Adultism. We are going to explore how we can understand children as a marginalized demographic in our society, some of the attitudes that contribute to this marginalization, and of course, the monster stories that can illuminate these aspects of our culture. So let’s dive right in.

            One of the monsters that we most associate with childhood is the boogeyman. The boogeyman is less a singular monster than a broad monster type. The Dictionary of English Folklore by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud defines it as “any figure deliberately used to frighten others, almost always children, to control their behavior” (Simpson and Roud 28). Bogeys or boogeymen (or bugbears, or other variations) could be fairies, ghosts, demons – even “the local doctor or policeman,” when used as a threatening figure to keep kids in line (29). Simpson and Roud note that the most common threats associated with this type of monster are kidnapping and cannibalism.

            Boogeymen are not just confined to English folklore. Wikipedia’s entry on this monster has a very fun list of cultural variants. The link is in the description with the works cited, and if you’re in the mood for a Wikipedia black hole, this is a great starting point. Standouts include El Coco from the Spanish-speaking world, who eats children if they refuse to go to sleep. (Pity the tiny insomniacs.) Belize has a goblin called Tata Duende whose forest-dwelling presence is used to keep children from straying into the wilderness or going out late at night. We can find a similar function of controlling children’s space in Sicily’s Marabbecca, a water monster that snatches children playing too close to wells or reservoirs. Incidentally, when looking for images for this video, I couldn’t find any published artwork of the Marabbecca, but her fanart represents the essential shapeshifting nature of boogeyman-type monsters, as I saw depictions ranging from a beautiful witch or a hag to giant frogs to fully Lovecraftian eldritch horrors. Not quite as amorphous but just as culturally malleable is the “sack man” subtype of the boogeyman, which is straight up just a guy who stuffs misbehaving children in a bag and carries them away. Simple enough. You can find variations of this guy in places as far from each other as Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Vietnam. This is just a small sampling of the time-honored, multicultural tradition of scaring the crap out of kids until they do what adults want them to do.

            Karra Shimabukuro writes, “Folkloric figures do not completely change through time; they simply become reimagined, providing us a lens through which to view our own world” (Shimabukuro 45). Boogeymen, as the ultimate overlap between “the monster” and “the child,” provide us with a lens through which we can start to understand prevailing attitudes about children and childhood. In some of these stories, we can find real adult fears. Jungles and reservoirs are, in fact, dangerous to children; families who live near them will understandably do what they can to keep their kids from getting lost or drowning or coming to other grievous bodily harm. Is instilling a fear of cannibalism or kidnapping the most psychologically healthy way of doing that? Perhaps not, but at least the kids’ll be alive to work that out in therapy later. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen tells us that monsters “police the borders of the possible.” This function of monstrosity can sometimes be quite literal when we look at monsters’ relationship with geography. There are many types of monsters whose purpose is to delineate where people should and should not go. Think of the “here be monsters” portions of old maps, where sea monsters inhabit the dangerous, often unnavigable waters. As long as you don’t go where the monsters are – the forest, the well, the ocean – you can remain safe.

            But not all boogeymen are safeguarding children’s physical wellbeing. Plenty of those other examples focus primarily on children’s behavior: going to bed when they’re told, not acting spoiled, obeying the adults in their lives. Now, here’s where we can start to unpack common attitudes and beliefs about childhood – and how those beliefs may impact real children.

            Childhood is both a biological and a social category. As I discussed a bit in my last video – link to that in the description below – there are a few things that we can claim about childhood that are broadly true regardless of culture. Babies are born small and without a lot of cognitive and motor skills. In most (but not all) cases, these skills will develop throughout the life course, with the period of time we call childhood representing the most outwardly obvious period of rapid growth and learning. Babies require a lot of adult care to stay alive long enough to get to this period, and then children who are walking and talking continue to learn about the world around them and their place within it from older people in their lives.

            If that all seems obvious and broad, that’s because I can’t get much more specific without leaving the realm of biology and heading straight into culture. Even everything I already mentioned, while it may be true the world over, is not all understood in the same way. The ways in which cultures make sense of – make meaning out of – this early part of the human life course is what we can refer to as socially constructed childhood. These are the ideas and ideologies about childhood that may be derived from interpretration of biological facts, but are not themselves universal or natural truths. Instead, they are cultural principles, values, and philosophies that organize the ways childhood functions within a society.

            Take, for example, education. Biologically, most people rapidly learn a lot throughout childhood – but what should that learning look like? K-12 schools? Trade apprenticeships? Multi-age community schooling? Homeschooling? Where should children live while they’re being educated – with families or with the educators (or are those one and the same)? What should they learn? Reading, writing, ’rithmetic? Farm management skills? What about moral values? How and by whom should those be instilled? What institutions and laws should exist to ensure that children get the education that, collectively, a society has decided that they need? Learning may be biological, but education is socially constructed.

            Crucially, “socially constructed” doesn’t mean “not real.” Children’s entire realities are often shaped around social constructions of education, which determine where they physically are, who they’re with, and, of course, what they know – or are supposed to know. Also, I’m an educator. Obviously, I have strong opinions about what constitutes a good education, and I believe even more strongly in education being accessible to all. Education is incredibly real: it’s just derived from human cultures, and as such, ideas about it are not universal. That’s what social constructions are all about.

            So let’s bring this back to the boogeyman. What do various cultures’ propensity to scare children into “good behavior” tell us about those cultures’ social constructions of childhood? There’s clearly a hierarchy at play, in which adult desires, management of time, and social values are seen as more important than children’s – so much so that the maintenance of these desires, values, etc. can be outsourced to monsters. In my first video essay (another link below), I provide a definition of monstrosity as the antagonistic opposite of humanity. So children’s conformity to what adults want them to do is so crucial that breaking those rules literally calls in the anti-human to respond to it. To be proper humans – to not invite the encroachment and danger of monstrosity – children must be the way adults want them to be.

            I imagine this reading of the boogeyman may provoke a little defensiveness among some of my adult audience. Hold on, some of you may be saying. Children do have to defer to adults. That’s what keeps them safe. That’s how they learn right and wrong. If those thoughts may have crossed your mind, I invite you to really sift through how much of that belief is based in the biological, and how much is based on your own social constructions of childhood. That’s not something a lot of people do, by the way – we tend to take our social constructions very much for granted. So interrogating your own puts you a step ahead in terms of critical thinking – and I hope we can all agree that our world could use some more of that.

            The truth is, there are a lot of contradictions baked into our social constructions of childhood. On the one hand, in modern Western culture, we are very attached to the idea of childhood as a time of innocence. I know I keep kind of teasing this idea, and rest assured, in my next video I’ll be starting a whole series on what this concept is really all about. But if children are so “naturally” innocent, why do we need boogeymen to keep them in line? Well, part of the answer is that boogeymen definitely predate our modern construction of childhood innocence, but their continued coexistence with this competing ideology of childhood is something that I think demonstrates how narrow that idea of innocence can really be. Children are innocent as long as they go where they’re supposed to go, do what they’re supposed to do, say what they’re supposed to say. Basically, as long as they don’t annoy adults too much. As long as adulthood remains in charge of childhood.

            And with that, let’s get into the concept of adultism.

ADULTISM AND MATILDA

            Adultism, according to scholar and children’s rights activist John Wall, is “the historically normative marginalization of children by age” (Wall, 327). (Full disclosure, John Wall is a professor at Rutgers University-Camden’s Department of Childhood Studies, where I got my PhD. Shout out to my old department!) We can understand adultism in similar terms as we do other systemic forms of marginalization and minoritization: these attitudes are baked into our social structures and institutions such as schools and laws. Wall writes that “Children are understood as lesser human beings: less rational, less developed, less competent, and less valued as citizens. Adultism so understood represents a side of “paternalism,” when the pater or “father” is recognized as not only gendered but also aged” (Wall, 329). Again, this statement may induce a little defensiveness in some adults. We may balk at “less valued” – surely, children are the most valuable, the most precious! But less developed, less competent? Isn’t that at least a little biological and therefore factual?

            Well, where does that belief lead us? Wall argues nowhere good: “Children’s mistreatment—for example, their being subject to physical punishment, being banned from public spaces, and lack of real voices in schools—is underwritten by the cultural acceptance of an in-built adult-child hierarchy” (Wall, 328). There is a difference between recognizing the range of, for example, cognitive functions among children and adults – which are not nearly as clearly distinct and delineated as we assume, by the way – versus translating difference into deficit. In other words, adultism functions by defining children as less than adults. Less what? Less fully human. Not finished actually turning into “real” people – and therefore less deserving of the autonomy that we otherwise consider part and parcel of human rights.

Now, in some ways, we do have a cultural awareness of adultism as a potential problem – at least when it goes too far, even for adults at the top of that hierarchy. And as we often do, we explore these limits of acceptable human behavior with monster stories, such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda.

            Okay, so here’s where you learn that I tend to cast a pretty wide net when it comes to identifying narratives as monster stories. It’s true, Matilda doesn’t have any literal nonhuman entities in it. In fact, the only supernatural person is Matilda herself, as she uses her telekinetic powers to navigate a brutally adultist environment. But I think we can pretty comfortably classify the Trunchbull as a monster in terms of narrative function.

            First, let’s back up. For anyone who is either unfamiliar with Matilda or has not read or watched its (excellent) film adaptation since their own childhood, a refresher: Matilda is a kindergartner with the odds stacked against her. She is the unwanted daughter of a family of lazy grifters, the Wormwoods. Her father is a crooked used car salesman, and her mother is as materialistic as she is negligent. This being a Roald Dahl story, these characters are painted in very broad, often grotesque strokes. The exaggeration of their negative traits edges Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood into a monstrous category, as their neglect and abuse of their daughter easily break the rules of human society – even an adultist one. This is especially true in the film adaptation, where the opening scene shows the Wormwoods letting the newborn Matilda slide all around the trunk of the car as they recklessly drive home from the hospital, complaining the whole time about the price and inconvenience of having her. But even the Wormwoods have nothing on Miss Trunchbull.

            Miss Trunchbull is the headmistress of Matilda’s school. Dahl describes her thus: “She was above all a most formidable female. She had once been a famous athlete, and even now the muscles were still clearly in evidence. You could see them in the bull-neck, in the big shoulders, in the thick arms, in the sinewy wrists and in the powerful legs. Looking at her, you got the feeling that this was someone who could bend iron bars and tear telephone directories in half” (Dahl 83).

            So there’s a lot going on here. Despite the potential benefits of how Matilda illuminates systems of adultism, Roald Dahl was, shall we say, not a perfect person. In creating his monstrous Trunchbull, he reveals some of his own gender biases. When called upon to portray a cruel, anti-human figure who breaks the most fundamental rules of society, he defaults to … a masculine woman. Womp-womp. The Trunchbull is a good example of how monsters or monstrous characters often reveal a lot of cultural assumptions and ideologies, even when those assumptions aren’t necessarily the point of the story.

            Because the main purpose of the Trunchbull as a character is to demonstrate the outsized power that adults have over children, how adults justify that power to themselves, and the fundamental injustice that this power differential generates. Again, the film adaptation makes this particularly clear, giving the Trunchbull the following dialogue: “I have never been able to understand why small children are so disgusting. They’re the bane of my life. They’re like insects: they should be got rid of as early as possible.” The Trunchbull puts this disgust into action by doing things like throwing little girls over the fence by their pigtails, forcing Bruce Bogtrotter to eat an entire cake by himself, and, of course, locking children in the Chokey, which is a narrow cupboard lined with spikes into which the Trunchbull shoves “misbehaving” children.

            In a way, the Trunchbull is a boogeyman. Her monstrous behavior is, in theory, a response to children’s disobedience. Bruce stole a piece of her cake. Even Amanda Thripp, the pigtails girl, technically wasn’t supposed to have pigtails, based on the Trunchbull’s own rules – and who has more right to set the rules than the adult Headmistress? But Matilda provides a child-centric take on the boogeyman, in which the monstrous punishments are clearly unjustified by whatever small infractions the adults imagine the children have committed. Yet, even though the children know that the Trunchbull is cruel and unfair, they are powerless to stop her. Matilda herself points out that no parent would believe the tales of the Trunchbull’s outrageousness (even parents who actually care about their children, unlike Matilda’s). Not only is the Trunchbull too over-the-top, but children are often seen as inherently unreliable narrators.

            In one of the most iconic scenes in the film adaptation, Mr. Wormwood berates his daughter with the following words: “I’m smart; you’re dumb. I’m big; you’re little. I’m right; you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” Later, the Trunchbull repeats him verbatim. Of course, Matilda can actually do something about it; her quick thinking and telekinesis save the day. However, while there are plenty of quick-thinking kids in real life, unfortunately there aren’t any telekinetic ones. Matilda’s power is the only overtly fantastical part of this narrative. In an adultist society, children’s power often is just that: a fantasy.

            Even those adults who try to act on behalf of the wellbeing of children often still reinforce their marginalization, simply because it is so deeply ingrained in our society. Annette Ruth Appell writes about the limitations of child-centered jurisprudence in legal proceedings. Even lawyers and judges attempting to create positive outcomes for young people are hampered by the legal definitions of children – of minors – as dependents. Appell writes, “The legal construction of children in the United States as dependent – and of dependency as private, familial, and developmental – obscures both the contingency of childhood and the law’s role in creating and maintaining childhood” (Appell, 19). Legally, an adult has to be in charge of a child’s decision-making and physical whereabouts at all times. That adult inherently has more legal rights than the child. Those rights can be stripped if the legal system decides the adult – generally, a parent – is abusing those rights, but that still requires the child to be transferred as a dependent over to another adult. It’s adult decision making all the way down.

            Indeed, we see how Matilda’s wellbeing depends on her ability to navigate and change her own legal status while remaining a dependent. She can’t leave school, but she can torment the Trunchbull into leaving. She needs a legal guardian, but at least she is able to convince the Wormwoods to relinquish their parental rights and sign her over to Miss Honey. The ease of this transaction is almost as fantastical as Matilda’s telekinesis, but even this heightened, unrealistic narrative acknowledges that Matilda, as a child, has fewer rights than whoever is legally in charge of her. Appell writes that, within the legal system, “child-centered jurisprudence equates progress with the transition of children from property to persons, but … sheds little light on what personhood means for children outside of their dependent status. In other words, the personhood of the child of child-centered jurisprudence exists only within the boundaries of dependency, vis-à-vis parent, state, and school” (Appell, 29). Matilda is not able to change these boundaries; the extent of her power is simply to finagle herself into better guardians.

            And with that, we see one of the potential limitations of illustrating big systemic issues like adultism through monster stories. Perhaps a surprising thing for me to say here on The Monster & The Child, but remember one of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s main tenets of metaphor from their landmark Metaphors We Live By. Metaphors like monsters reveal certain aspects of a concept, but they also conceal other aspects. The Trunchbull reveals the adultist power hierarchy under which children are seen as less-than and are therefore afforded fewer rights than adults. However, by depicting this system through a single larger-than-life, exaggerated monster character, we can lose some of the broader implications. Matilda is able to vastly improve her own life, but the adultist system that created the conditions of her suffering in the first place still remains.

AN ISM AMONG ISMS: ADULTISM AND THE HUNGER GAMES

            There are, of course, some narratives that do try to unpack a broader, systemic understanding of systems of oppression. Some of them also do this with monsters. One very famous example is Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Not to overexplain a cultural juggernaut, but The Hunger Games trilogy, along with its prequels A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping, explore the dystopian world of Panem. Panem is, geographically, the remains of the United States in a very bleak future. The Capitol, the seat of its government, rules in absolute power over the twelve to thirteen Districts, which exist in varying levels of economic deprivation. Of course, the Districts did not settle into their states of oppression willingly. The Hunger Games themselves exist as a testament to the history of the Districts’ first failed revolution. Every year on the anniversary of the Districts’ defeat, two youths, ages twelve to eighteen, are chosen from each district to compete in a televised fight to the death.

            In the epilogue of A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, we get some insight into the origins of the Games. The philosophy supports a dark view of human nature, especially in the use of children as fighters: “Because we credit them with innocence. And if even the most innocent among us turn to killers in the Hunger Games, what does that say? That our essential nature is violent.” The Games use this object lesson in humanity’s brutality to enshrine the use of that brutality within the seat of dictatorial authority, while reminding would-be rebels that their own violence will only lead to their own suffering. We all may be violent – but we are not all powerful. So the use of children is doing double duty here: not only does their involvement in the Games defile innocence and create disillusionment in the populace, but it also symbolizes the Districts’ powerlessness. After all, in an adultist society, who is more powerless than a child?

            Adultism is not the only thing that endangers the children of Panem – or at least, not adultism functioning by itself. No system of oppression operates in isolation. All children may face certain restrictions to their rights on account of their age, as John Wall points out: “Children face this broader discriminatory form of adultism across their lives, such as in lacking democratic voices, being denied standing in court, and not being provided with required asylum procedures” (Wall, 329). But even within that statement, we can see that some children will face more of adultism’s material impact to their wellbeing than others. For instance, when I was a child, I never needed asylum procedures. That was an aspect of adultism that did not affect me due to my additional conditions of nationality, family security, financial security, race, etc.

            Suzanne Collins portrays the overlap of adultism with other systems of oppression literally in the first chapter of the first book. Our narrator Katniss, age sixteen, explains how young people’s names are entered into the lottery for the Games. When you’re twelve, you get entered once; the next year, your name goes in again, so you have two chances of being drawn; and so on until you’re eighteen. But, Katniss tells us, it’s not actually that simple: “Say you are poor and starving as we were. You can opt to add your name more times in exchange for tesserae. Each tessera is worth a meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person. You may do this for each of your family members as well. So, at the age of twelve, I had my name entered four times. Once, because I had to, and three times for tesserae for grain and oil for myself, Prim, and my mother” (Collins 13).

            All children in Panem have fewer rights than even the incredibly disenfranchised adults. I mean, at least the adults don’t have to fight to the death anymore. But children in poverty experience the impact of the loss of their rights to a greater extent. Adultism and classism intersect, and the workings of these systems in tandem keep the machine of the Capitol chugging along.

            Suzanne Collins employs monsters to illustrate this world of adultism as an ism among isms. We have some very literal monsters, such as the muttations that the Capitol genetically engineers to torment the Hunger Games contestants. Examples include tracker jackers, aggressive hallucination-inducing wasps, which I have had actual nightmares about. Even more horrifying are the wolf mutts that pursue the last remaining contestants in the first book. These hybrid creatures represent each of the fallen tributes, and appear to have been made using the dead children’s actual eyeballs. This is about as monstrous as it gets, with the combination of not only animal and human but living and dead. The innocent children have been reduced to literal beasts, no longer human at all: the ultimate threat and promise of the Hunger Games.

            Yet even these creatures pale in comparison to President Coriolanus Snow. General shout-out to Collins here: having your villain’s breath smell like roses and blood is just such a rad character design choice. It’s just really freaking good. That’s so unsettling, I’m obsessed. Especially in Mockingjay (spoilers) when he laughs at his execution with blood dripping from his mouth: exquisite. Like, I know, hot take, mega-bestselling blockbuster The Hunger Games is good actually, but we simply must give credit where credit is due.

            Anyway, Snow, like the Trunchbull, is not literally nonhuman, but he is certainly inhuman enough to qualify as a monster. He functions as that antagonistic opposite to the qualities of humanity that the protagonists want to preserve and are fighting for. He is the old, white-bearded face of adultist oppression and the pristine rich figure who stands above the oppressed poor. Katniss, as a poor child, is his natural enemy, and he is hers.

            While Snow may be the monstrous symbol of the system, however, he is not its entirety. Defeating the Trunchbull solves all the problems of the children in her school, but defeating Snow does not solve all of Panem’s problems. That’s one of the major points of the entire third book, Mockingjay, as Katniss contends with the power hunger and manipulations of the revolution’s leaders. The triumphant new president, Alma Coin, even wants to reinstate the Hunger Games, only this time with the children of the Capitol as contestants. The actual leadership of the government might be changing, but the adultist system is harder to dismantle, especially because of the underlying assumptions that what happens to children is the responsibility of adults to decide. Appell writes, “A variety of adults have authority over children. These adults range from their parents to teachers, health care providers, and, for some children, lawyers. These adults, with varying levels of knowledge of and authority over the specific child, have great power in a child’s life but little accountability to the child because of the child’s lack of authority” (Appell, 32). Katniss, as a contestant in the Hunger Games, is at the mercy of the state. She is a symbol of the powerlessness of the people. Then, as the Mockingjay, the face of the revolution, Katniss remains a symbol of the powerless people rising up. But that doesn’t actually make her more powerful. She is still a child, beholden to the decisions of adults, and these adults are not accountable to her. Until – because this is still a narrative, with a structure that demands some form of cathartic resolution – Katniss does have the opportunity to call one of the shots, very literally, pun fully intended. She ushers in a new era for children, as demonstrated by her eventual willingness to have kids of her own in the trilogy’s epilogue, as they are no longer at risk of violent death at the hands of the state. A big improvement, to be sure. But, as is the purpose of dystopia as a genre, the reader is positioned to wonder about the implications of this story within their own world. In the absence of a bow and arrow, what can we do to start dismantling the monstrous workings of adultism?

CONCLUSION

            In Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge, John Wall claims, “children’s rights are the greatest remaining frontier in humanity’s experiment in human rights as such” (Wall 3). It’s a bold statement, and a challenging one for many adults. Honestly, it’s a challenging statement for plenty of actual young people, too; they’re as enmeshed in our culture’s social constructs as anyone else. And with childhood, again, we do always run into issues of actual cognitive and physical needs for care. What Wall and scholars like him challenge us to consider is whether this care must be synonymous with the type of dependency we have enshrined in our legal, familial, and educational systems today.

            Wall differentiates between philosophies of “child saving” and “child empowerment.” Child saving is “the assumption that children’s rights exist primarily as means for children to be taken care of by adults: to be protected from various kinds of violence and harm and to be provided with various kinds of entitlements and resources” (Wall 4). Good parents or teachers or actors of the state keep children safe from danger, either by physically determining where they can go or by impressing upon them the kinds of behaviors they need in order to stay safe – to not invite a visit from the boogeyman. Child empowerment, on the other hand, “means that children’s rights are founded on a deeper respect for children as equally important contributors to societies” (Wall 4).

            Some stories, like Matilda and The Hunger Games – which are, not coincidentally, intended for young readers – start to get at what it means to treat children as real contributors to society, instead of property or symbols. By portraying some of the workings of adultism through monstrous figures like the Trunchbull and President Snow, these narratives reveal the systems of power that are hidden and taken for granted in our own world. That’s one of the things that monsters do best. They render the usually invisible grotesqueries of our lives all too obvious, whether through the horror of blood and roses or … a buff lady. You win some, you lose some. Still: portraying children’s lack of rights as a monstrous violation of humanity is one way that narratives can support children’s empowerment.

            But how do we avoid that trap of child saving? That is something I am going to explore further in my upcoming series of videos about the construction of “childhood innocence.” If you know anything at all about Childhood Studies, you knew this was coming! There are a lot of great monsters and monster stories that can help us unpack this topic, so I hope I’ll see you back here in two weeks to dive in. I’m planning on sticking to the video schedule of every other Sunday, but to make it easy on yourself, make sure to ring the bell for notifications. I hope you will also give this video a like if you enjoyed it, and go ahead and subscribe to the channel so you never miss a monster-y conversation. I’d love to see your comments about adultism and monstrosity below – in what stories, fictional or otherwise, do you see these two concepts overlap? Let’s keep that conversation going.

            And with that, I will take my leave for now. I can’t wait to see you next time on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Boogeymen of various shapes and sizes
• Matilda by Roald Dahl (1988)
• Matilda, dir. Danny DeVito (1996)
• The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008-2010)
• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins (2020)

References:

• Bogeyman. (2025, June 19.) In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogeyman
• Appell, A.R. (2013). The Prepolitical Child of Child-Centered Jurisprudence. In A.M. Duane (Ed.), The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (pp. 19-37). The University of Georgia Press.
• Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.
• Shimabukuro, K. (2014). The Bogeyman of Your Nightmares: Freddy Krueger’s Folkloric Roots. Studies in Popular Culture, 36(2), 45-65.
• Simpson, J., & Roud, S. (2000). A dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press.
• Wall, J. (2016). Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Wall, J. (2023). Adultism and voting age discrimination. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 36(2), 327–340.